


At All Their Graves Again

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: 5+1 Things, Backstory, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 01:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11544633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: Sigrun has lost people before Tuuri, but some losses weigh harder than others.





	At All Their Graves Again

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by discussion/speculation in the comments section of Page 754.

I

Sigrun barely remembers the great-grandmother she's named after, but she knows that that Sigrun went alone into the mountains age 82, with all her joints acting like they were being paid to keep her in bed, and took down her last troll. It made the funeral easier, on her father's hand, and to be proud. She didn't even cry that time, but she saluted with her toy sword and got a sip of watered-down mead at the feast after. 

Well. Little kids are dumbasses, Sigrun's always said that. She's not going to tell the rest of them about this one. 

II 

It's harder to be proud if the girl who's your best friend and you made out with behind the trainee barracks is going to be motherless and all alone the moment the ship hits shore. Sigrun probably Emil-faced, then, like he's staring at Tuuri's pyre now.

Hildny went into the sea, too - but in a whale fight, like a flash after a man overboard. Cold water got her. Bravest ship-captain of Dalsnes, Hildny never beached her trolls. It doesn't comfort Dagny at all, by the ship-shaped cairn. Another captain and her first beaching later, Sigrun never goes seafaring again. 

III

Þórveig's funeral Sigrun doesn't get to go to. She's sixteen and stuck in a holding cell for slipping their mage her gun. She's furious, in tears, rattling at the bars as the procession winds to the graveyard by torchlight, and the fire rises with sparks up on Falkestinden across the bay, in a long stripe on the water. 

Sigrun did her a kindness, that's what she says before the tribunal - no two weeks' useless quarantine, no Rash creeping darkness into her teammate's mind and body. A quick and easy end, for Þórveig at least, and she'd do it over again. 

IV & V

Marten dies first. Sigrun's barely got time to register it, the crack of bone that snaps his neck. Next moment she's fighting for her life like never before, just a moment ago rushing ahead around a bend in the homeward path, backtracking from a rockslide, her mind on the mead hall and her bed after a long and pointless day. 

The Rash bastards know their tactics, Sigrun figures, bleeding in a losing battle, and locks eyes with Norid, her cheery second-in-command who's slated for captaincy the next year down, she's just that good. And just that dead, throwing herself into the thick of trolls to buy them an escape. 

For the rest of her team to live, they need to go. 

Sigrun passes out halfway down the mountain, wakes home in hospital with Dagny at her side. No words left, there, or when she drags herself onto a pair of crutches to stand silent with their families at their cairns. The doctors call it pointless torture, she calls it duty, and forces the memories into nonchalance until she clears off a therapist's fancy desk for being made to talk. 

She's learned her lesson the hard way: Never this again.

+1

She's saluting with a toy sword all over again, and rattling bars for something that she can't and won't undo. 

Short of living and getting away fine, her Fuzzy-Head was brave in all the ways - in Hildny's and Norid's and Þórveig's, even great-grandmother Sigrun's, even Marten's. She's standing at all their graves again that night, until sunrise slips awful and silent into the clearing, and the pyre becomes Tuuri's alone. 

Tuuri deserves more than this, songs and stories for remembrance. All that Sigrun has is pointless torture. If she wants the rest of them to live, they need to go.

**Author's Note:**

> If some of the names or scenarios seem familiar, you probably encountered them in some of my other fics, on both of my accounts. Writing this I was quite baffled how many people I'd killed around Sigrun in my stories, but I figure as a troll-hunter she must have seen her share of loss. 
> 
> Dagny is "No-Arms" from Page 200, and drabbles IV and V allude to the ambush Sigrun mentions on Page 385. 
> 
> 6x100 words as per GDocs.


End file.
